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Emmet and John talk about America's delight in self-serving, cruel narcissists via the movies Vice and GoodFellas in addition to an essay by Jim Shepard. The conversation ranges from the political cu…

Writer and co-host of the Aufhebungabunga podcast Alex Hochuli joins Emmet and John to talk about his latest article in American Affairs: "The Brazilianization of the World." They talk about Alex's a…

John and Emmet talk about facts, bureaucracy, science as a social process, the social telos of internet moderation as a culture, and more.

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Emmet sits down with economic historian Edgardo Sepulveda to talk about the history of the electrical grid in America from the 1920s until the closure of Indian Point. They talk vertical integration,…

Emmet and John use three articles to talk about our woke empire and how much it feels like the neocon heyday of the early 2000s. We talk about the major cultural resonances between the post-Trump era…

Mark Nelson returns to the pod to explain Germany's Energiwende policy and its dependence on Nordstream 2 pipeline from Russia. Emmet and Mark talk about American green Malthusianism's influence on t…

We discuss the movie Jasper Mall, which follows the small-town Alabama mall's decline over the course of a year. They discuss the movie, what killed Sears, our lives working and hanging out at variou…

Emmet sits down with Default Friend of After the Orgy about her piece on the Culture of Confession, the emotional history of the internet, millenial blues, how tumblr turned the academy woke, and mor…

Founder of the Campaign for a Green Nuclear Deal, [Madison Czerwinski](@Madi_Czerwinski), sits down with Emmet to talk about the closure of the Indian Point nuclear plant in New York, the status of t…

Emmet and John talk about Eliot's essay on what it means for a writer to fit into a tradition. We talk about what that means for us, how we shape the past as we make our present, the confessional poe…

Token Gen-Xer Josh Bregman joins Emmet to discuss Robert Downey Jr.'s documentary about the '92 election, The Last Party. They discuss the NGO Industrial Complex, why the culture war is built to be e…

Emmet and John discuss two articles and try to fine-tune their understanding of who the American elites are and how they've changed over time. Do elites have the same interes? The same culture? Do th…

A discussion of Ontario's lockdown and the fight over the grid in Texas turns into a longer conversation about decadence vs. decline, aesthetic education, and how we try to cultivate ourselves and fi…

Emmet and Geoff Shullenberger talk about a mutual favorite film: Cronenberg's Videodrome. They talk about how it pre-empted our fractured digital lives and the inscrutable, parapolitical world we inh…

Emmet and John sit down to speak with Meredith Angwin about her new book, Shorting the Grid, on America's fragile electric grid. We talk about how and why the grid became fragile, energy auctions, re…

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John and I had fun with this one. We talk through MacIntyre's analysis of the failure of the Enlightenment's ethical project and the difficu…

In a brief addition to the Lasch Files, we discuss his essay, "The Cultural Cold War: A Short History of the Congress for Cultural Freedom." We go through the Alger Hiss case, the ACCF, the Korean Wa…

Emmet sits down with Ashley Frawley to talk about her work on the semiotics of happiness, the knowledge class, and the how to think about freedom. Ashley was a great guest and we hope to have her ret…

We review Alex Lee Moyer's documentary TFW NO GF. We talk about loneliness, the shitty American media class, the value of friendship, and a whole lot else. This one's a chiller.

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Last month, CyberCharles joined Emmet to break down what happened with the big SolarWinds hack, how digital supply chains work, how citizens should think about these issues, and much more.

This is a…